Recently, I complained about standards sometimes becoming investment-retarted because they are too difficult to implement. This is most evident in the world wide web. HTML was originally developed with not a very clear vision of what was to become of the web. Rather than revise the standard completely, it has been extended, bent, twisted, and complexicised (my own word) to handle page layout difficulties that were simply never planned for from the beginning.
It has developed to the point where it's impossible to have even a reasonably complex layout structure without having to account for the different ways that various popular browsers interpret, support, or extend existing standards. To feed the beast webmasters, or should I say web gurus, have developed a series of hacks that are now commonplace to deal with said browsers. A significant portion of the internet is not accessible to handicapped people because accessibility standards are both equally complex and a secondary thought in the mind of most webmasters.
So now comes the dawn of a new beginning. Call it Internet 3, A New Hope (with all due credit to George Lucas et all)
So let's start with just one problem. Why are navigation elements even part of web pages? Web pages are meant to be pages like those of a book. Now they are being used for such a wide variety of purposes that it only makes sense to re-structure.
The restructuring should implement two primary objectives - 1) make the standards simple to understand and follow. So simple that a book need not be written or read to follow. 2) incorporate the capability to deal with future elements that have yet to be envisioned. Number 2 sounds difficult, but it truly is not if number 1 is taken seriously. Following these two elements would make the internet so much easier to deal with for everyone involved - except for spammers, because it would be that much more difficult to trick people if everybody had a very basic comprehension of how things work.
Where would we be as a society if we just kept things simple and easy to understand? How much progress has been held back because our most intelligent members of society have spent such a significant amount of time working through problems that never needed to exist in the first place? How many more choices would we have opened up for ourselves if it didn't take so much ingenuity to publish information?
Keep it simple. Fight to keep it simple. Think forward. Think outside the box.
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